• FOR€lGN • RELIGlOVS > 56RI€:S» 

THE PECULIARITY O F TH£ 
RELIGION OFTHe BIBLE 




V CON Ft A D * VON • OR.6LLI * 



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Foreign Religious Series 



Edited by 
R. J. COOKE, D. D. 



Second Series. i6mo. cloth. Each 40 cents, net. 



DO WE NEED CHRIST FOR 

COMMUNION WITH GOD ? 

By Professor Ludwig Lemme, of the University 
of Heidelberg 



ST. PAUL AS A THEOLOGIAN 

(two parts) 

By Professor Paul Peine, of the University of Vienna 



THE NEW MESSAGE IN THE TEACHING 
OF JESUS 

By Professor Philipp Bachmann, of the University 
of Erlangen 



THE PECULIARITY OF THE RELIGION 

OF THE BIBLE 

By Professor Conrad Von Orelli, of the University 
of Basle 



OUR LORD 

By Professor K. Miiller, of the University of Erlangen 



The Peculiarity of the 
Religion of the Bible 



By 

CONRAD VON ORELLI 

Professor of Theology at Basle 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



I 



|uBRARY of CO^Ssl 
\ Two Copies itectt*&l | 

MAR 8 1908 



Copyright, 1908, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The general character and purpose of 
these books have already beeo indicated in 
the Introduction to the entire series, so that 
on the publication of this the second part it 
need only be said that each of the six vol- 
umes in this series has a peculiar value of 
its own. The authors are recognized schol- 
ars of high rank in their several fields of 
research, and while the task of translating 
the extremely involved German of some of 
them into good English has been at times 
most difficult, and something may have been 
lost in the process, nevertheless their fine 
perception of divine truth, no less than their 
scientific method of treatment, will appeal to 
the honest judgment of thoughtful men and 
will strengthen conviction in the validity of 
evangelical teaching. 

In St. Paul as a Theologian Professor 
Feine exhibits Pauline theology as the con- 
tent of the apostle's missionary preaching 
based upon his personal experience of Jesus 
Christ, and not, as certain critics affirm, an 
attempted systematizing of Christian thought 
5 



6 Prefatory Note 



modified or enlarged by odds and ends of 
Rabbinic theology brought over by Paul 
from Judaism. Incidentally, in opposition 
to the criticism of Wrede, Weinel, and 
others, the author shows the dependence of 
Paul upon Jesus. 

The Peculiarity of the Religion of 
the Bible, by Professor Orelli, is an 
answer to the ancient query now often heard 
among some theologians of a liberal type 
and not a few specialists in the department 
of Comparative Religion, "Are not Arbana 
and Pharpar better than all the waters in 
Israel, may I not wash in them and be 
clean ?" A fitting companion to this volume 
is The New Message in the Teaching of 
Jesus, setting forth the profound originality 
of the Master Teacher. Do We Need 
Christ for Communion with God? and 
the excellent volume entitled Our Lord pre- 
sent in a very clear and satisfactory manner 
the impossibility of eliminating or of sub- 
ordinating the Christ of Christendom in 
Christian thought and life. 

It is only stating exact truth when we say 
that notwithstanding the immense learning 
and intellectual brilliancy of eminent schol- 



Prefatory Note 7 



ars in the camp of so-called liberal theology, 
there is evidence, as may be seen in a recent 
work, The Modern Jesus Cult, by Professor 
Wilhelm von Schnecten, himself a radical of 
the modern school, that the equally brilliant 
and scientifically equipped defenders of the 
historic faith have shown the emptiness of 
radical thought and fully established the 
historicity of the gospel records. 

On the whole, we are of the opinion that 
these volumes, the value of which is not in 
quantity but in quality, will be found help- 
ful and suggestive, and that a comprehen- 
sive survey of the important subjects cov- 
ered by this foreign religious series will jus- 
tify the statement that evangelical faith has 
nothing to fear from unfriendly criticism. 

Editor. 



THE PECULIARITY OF THE RELI- 
GION OF THE BIBLE 



I 

The Old Testament Religion 

"Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall 
not be reckoned among the nations. " 

Thus Balaam, the heathenish seer, charac- 
terized in his first parable the people upon 
whom devolved the highest mission in the 
history of religion. That we have to do 
here with a real prophecy is proved by the 
many thousand years of history of that peo- 
ple who even in their dispersion among the 
nations can never wholly deny their racial 
peculiarity and mental separateness. The 
Hebrew race owes this peculiarity above 
everything else to its religion, which was 
unique among the religions of the nations, 
as unique as Christianity which arose from 
it and which, as the highest blossom, was 
destined to become the universal religion for 
all nations. 

And yet these two, Judaism and Chris- 
9 



io The Peculiarity of the 

tianity, do not stand so isolated in the world 
as has formerly been imagined. To those 
genealogical lines by which the Israelites 
felt themselves connected with the entire 
human race (Gen. io. n) correspond also 
religious relations. It is true that between 
the most diverse religions inner, though not 
historical, relations may be proved, which 
relations rest on the analogy of every human 
spiritual and mental life biblically expressed ; 
on the self-manifestation of God to all men. 
But, as a rule, homogeneousness is much 
more apparent where it concerns consan- 
guineous tribes. As is known, the people 
of Israel belonged linguistically and ethno- 
graphically to the so-called Semitic group; 
we shall therefore not be surprised to find 
here also the nearest relatives as far as reli- 
gion is concerned. How was the Israelitish 
or Old Testament religion related to the 
religion of the Edomites, Moabites, Ammon- 
ites, Arameans, and other nations of like 
blood, as well as to the religion of the more 
distant Assyrians and Babylonians who also 
belonged to the Semitic group? 

But let us first examine what is meant by 
the Old Testament religion. Wellhausen, 



Religion of the Bible ii 

Stade, and others assert that the old Israel- 
itish national religion was something differ- 
ent from what is usually understood by the 
Old Testament religion, namely, a worship of 
Jehovah 1 as a limited tribal or national god 
who was originally a god of weather and 
war, but exercised no authority beyond his 
people and country. He was not considered 
as an absolute ruler upon earth or as creator 
of the universe; nor did ethical qualities 
belong to his nature, though ethical attributes 
were occasionally ascribed to him. Thus this 
Israelitish- Jehovah religion, as to its inner 
content, did not materially differ from the 
Chemosh-religion of the Moabites, the Mo- 
loch-religion of the Ammonites, the Baal- 
service of the Canaanites, etc. Since the time 
of Moses, however, Jehovah was looked upon 
as a jealous God, who on his soil and among 
his people would tolerate no other gods 
(monolatry, not monotheism), but who nev- 
ertheless was to share in the government 
with the Cananaean Baalim, which had al- 
ready possessed the country and would not 
be driven from the sacred places. It was 



1 For the name Yahve used by the author, I have sub- 
stituted the form familiar to English readers. — Editor. 



12 The Peculiarity of the 

only in the eighth century B. C. that the 
so-called "literary prophets/' headed by 
Amos, proclaimed Jehovah as the sole ruler 
and at the same time declared his covenant 
with Israel, which was formerly considered 
as a natural relation, as one established upon 
ethical conditions; and as such was indis- 
soluble. These prophets w r ere the founders 
of the ethical monotheism which after the 
exile became the religion of the people. 

In this conception of the school above men- 
tioned there lies a fundamental error. Ac- 
cording to my opinion this false notion has 
been best refuted by the Scotch scholar James 
Robertson. 1 But even such a critical investi- 
gator as Professor Giesebrecht has shown 
the untenableness of this view. It is strange 
therefore that Professor Stade in his Com- 
pendium of the Old Testament theology 
(1905) should repeat it again with such 
dogmatic confidence. It is the more pleasing 
that Professor Bantsch 2 has very recently 
emphasized in the most powerful manner 
the necessity of revising the historical-evolu- 
tion schemes of the W ellhausen school after 

1 The Ancient Religion of Israel before the Eighth Cen- 
tury (German second edition, Stuttgart, 1905). 

2 Altorientalischer und Israelitischer Monotheismus, 1906. 



Religion of the Bible 13 

he had convinced himself especially by com- 
paring the religio-historical connections that 
it would not do to press the old Israelitish 
history of religion into the scheme of the 
evolution theorists. 

In brief we state the following : Even if 
we should admit without examination the 
literary critical results of a Kuenen, Well- 
hausen and others which we could not advise, 
the essential traits of ethical monotheism, 
it must be admitted, already existed long be- 
fore the time of Amos, as is seen in the his- 
tory of Elijah, whose compositions these 
critics put before Amos, and especially in 
the ancient Jehovah-document of the Penta- 
teuch, which is certainly of higher antiquity. 
Think of Genesis 2. sqq., the history of the 
creation of man, of the paradise, the fall, 
the deluge, building of the tower of Babel, 
destruction of Sodom, etc. To avoid these 
instances Stade would indeed eliminate these 
portions from the ancient Jehovah-document 
and consider them as very recent Hebrew 
revisions of foreign materials which orig- 
inated shortly before the exile in the time 
of Babylonian- Assyrian influence. But here 
the arbitrary character of the criticism is too 



14 The Peculiarity of the 

notorious. The unaffectedly naive manner 
in which God is spoken of in these selections, 
as coming down from heaven upon earth to 
view the building made by men, of com- 
municating to Abram his purpose to convince 
himself personally whether the inhabitants of 
Sodom were as bad as their reputation, 
shows us indeed the oldest Hebrew writings 
which have come down to us. Notwith- 
standing the childlike imperfection in which 
God is here presented and exhibited, he 
is nevertheless the Almighty God who dwells 
in heaven, the creator of everything which 
is on earth, the all-ruling one who exercises 
righteous judgment over all nations, and so 
by no means a limited tribal or national God 
in whose character the ethical was no con- 
stituent element. 

These primeval testimonies point back to 
the pre-monarchical period. Before Samuel 
Israel must already have had this sublime 
knowledge of God. From whom could it 
come but from Moses, whom all ancient 
documents revere as the founder of the Is- 
raelitish national religion ? But Moses also 
proclaimed the God whom he preached, not 
as one who had thus far been entirely un- 



Religion of the Bible 15 

known, but as the God well known to the 
fathers. The name which all narrators of 
the Pentateuch mention as the first which 
stood in close relation to the God of Israel 
is Abram. 1 This name, according to all 
analogy, can only have been that of a human 
individual, not that of a god nor of a tribe, 
as one has tried to make himself believe ; and 
that this personality must be considered as 
historical, can today be scientifically affirmed 
with greater certainty, as may be shown 
from the monuments, than it could have been 
twenty or thirty years ago. 

When we speak of Old Testament or Is- 
raelitish religion, we mean that which the 
religiously enlightened Israelites since 
Moses, even since Abram, professed. That 
this monotheism became purified and de- 
veloped itself from Abram to Moses, from 
Moses down to Amos and Isaiah, from these 
dow r n to Jeremiah, is also our opinion. The 
Bible itself bears witness to this, when for 
instance it commences a new epoch of reli- 
gious development with Moses and marks 

1 Properly Abiram — 14 my father is exalted a beautiful 
expression which denotes at once God's eminence and 
intimacy! See the analogous formations, Abishua, Abim- 
elech, Abinadab, etc. 



1 6 The Peculiarity of the 

this epoch by making known a new name 
of God: "And I appeared unto Abraham, 
unto Isaac, and unto Jacob as El Shaddai 
(by the name of God Almighty), but by my 
name Jehovah was I not yet known to them" 
(Exod. 6. 3; see 3. 13 sq.). A new r name 
never means for the ancient Hebrews a mere 
formal change in the appellation, but has 
always its objective cause in the new rela- 
tions of the named. Applied to God the new 
name means a new disclosure of his deeper 
being, and according to this an advance of 
man in his understanding. "Evolution" is 
not wholly a bad term for this progress, for 
it expresses a self-unfolding of the Deity 
which allows man to look deeper into his 
nature. 

It may also be frankly admitted that, in 
this people as in other nations, higher and 
lower religious tendencies present themselves 
simultaneously. The God comprehended by 
Moses became the common possession of the 
whole people only incompletely, because hea- 
thenishly disposed undercurrents still pre- 
vailed among them and often became over- 
whelming, especially when the people were 
scattered over Canaan and entered into tribal 



Religion of the Bible 17 



relations with the older settlers, who sur- 
passed them in culture. But with Professor 
Ed. Koenig, 1 one must retain as a fact, his- 
torically demanded and conceded, that from 
the beginning of the national history of 
Israel we notice a purer religion among the 
appointed religious leaders of the nation, 
than may be perceived among their cognate 
neighbors, or the still more heathenishly dis- 
posed Canaanites. 

1 Die Hauptproblem der Altisraelitischen Religionsge- 
sckichte, 1884, G 7. sq. 



1 8 The Peculiarity of the 



II 

Personal Authors and Bearers of the 
Religion in Israel 

Whence this higher knowledge of God? 
Whether we abide by Moses or go back to 
Abram, according to the testimony of all 
Pentateuchal sources, it is always an indi- 
vidual personality which is mentioned as the 
human starting point. This is of great im- 
portance. It has often been pointed out that 
personal founders of the different religions 
are known, whereas others appear as the pro- 
duct and possession of the whole of a tribe 
or nation. This difference, however, is in- 
deed only a relative one. On the one hand 
the so-called founders of religion themselves 
stand on a national native soil, whose influ- 
ence on them is easily perceptible; on the 
other hand in the origin of all religions, we 
must imagine some especially endowed and 
inspired individuals as being more productive 
than others, just as in the progress of cul- 
ture, whether w T e know their names or not. 
Yet it is nevertheless of importance for the 



Religion of the Bible 19 



whole peculiarity and life of a religion, 
whether it originated, so to speak, from one 
personality and is ruled by him, or whether 
it developed more collectively and is con- 
sidered as the product of the whole. When 
a personal genius has impregnated the whole 
of a religion and is considered as its origina- 
tor or bearer, the acknowledgment is ex- 
pressed therein in the first place that religion 
in its foundation and origin is a personal 
experience ; and in the second place that the 
difference in the faculty of experiencing this 
must be very great among individuals. Only 
a few individuals become distinguished be- 
yond others by this faculty, and hence be- 
come authorities for others. 

Now, neither among the Greeks in his- 
torical time, the Romans, the ancient Egyp- 
tians, nor Babylonians, do we find such reli- 
gious authorities as a Moses, Samuel, and all 
the great prophets, an Amos and Hosea, an 
Isaiah and Jeremiah represent. Since in our 
time we often meet with the assertion that 
the Israelitish religion is wholly like the 
Babylonian and an offshoot from it, let us 
therefore look for once at the ancient 
Babylonians and Assyrians, and ascertain 



2o The Peculiarity of the 



who were their authorities in matters of reli- 
gion. One might perhaps refer to the fact 
that Hammurabi, king of Babylon, declared 
that he received his laws from the sun-god, 
just as Moses derived his from Jehovah. But 
in the introduction to that code that ruler 
mainly claims divine authority for his legis- 
lation which, so far as the contents are con- 
cerned, has nothing to do with religion. For 
religion itself the Babylonians never appealed 
to Hammurabi. Every Babylonian could have 
certain religious exercises, that is, dreams, 
apparitions, omens or visitations of divine 
displeasure. In such a case he could consult 
the interpreters of dreams and signs who 
formed a separate class of the priesthood; 
or he could ask the atoning priests who knew r 
which rites and sayings must be applied to 
banish the evil. This priesthood was in so 
far an authority for him, but only on account 
of its superior knowledge. Like the Egyp- 
tian, it possessed a transmitted knowledge 
of the divine and demoniacal powers and of 
the formulas for their exorcism. Such tra- 
ditions of magic were easily propagated 
from one generation to another; they did 
not require in the practitioner any ethico- 



Religion of the Bible 21 

religious conditions. Another Babylonian 
sacerdotal body mediated to the people astro- 
logical knowledge ; its brightest minds had 
most ingeniously observed the course of the 
stars and made possible the calculations of 
the course of the sun, moon, and planets. 
This body was the authority for fixing the 
calendar with the necessary instructions for 
the correct use of certain days ruled by 
special influences of the stars; but on the 
whole this was no religion but a conception 
of the world or indeed a religiously colored 
cosmology. As prominent as these efforts 
were in a physical respect, and great as was 
the acumen and methodical endurance to 
bring them about, as little did it require a 
religious experience or illumination. Hence 
the personality of these Babylonian or Egyp- 
tian soothsayers and astrologers was wholly 
unimportant for the matter itself. It only 
concerned the correct handling of magical 
technics. 

This difference between the alleged reli- 
gions and the Biblical is very important. 
Its significance becomes clear at once when 
one realizes what religion means. As truly, 
in the first place, as religion is a revelation 



22 The Peculiarity of the 

of man to God, more accurately, such a reve- 
lation as the deity with immediate certainty 
makes to man as ruler 1 ; so is it according to 
its origin and essence a property and an ex- 
pression of the human personal life. There- 
fore, the more personal a religion is the more 
original and vital it is. We shall therefore 
not be surprised to find that the higher reli- 
gions are just such as are their personal 
founders and. originators, who according to 
the conviction of their adherents experienced 
the deity in an extraordinary manner, where- 
as religions which came out from a person- 
ally undetermined tribal or national circle, 
generally occupy a lower degree. 

It is a characteristic of the Old Testament 
religion that from the beginning it is con- 
sciously witnessed by such men of God who 
had themselves experienced God's manifesta- 
tions. This concerns here not merely a 
founder of religion who, like Abram or 
Moses, had belonged to remote antiquity, 
but in the bright light of history, as the ex- 
amples of an Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Zechariah, and others prove. One might 



1 Orelli, Handbuch der allgemeinen Religionsgeschichte, 
1899, pp. 1 sqq. 



Religion of the Bible 23 

call such men religious geniuses; but the 
term would be unsuitable because these Is- 
raelitish prophets were conscious of owing 
their knowledge and their word not to their 
own creative genius, but to an experience of 
God, a revelation whereby they wholly knew 
themselves as the recipients. Who was the 
giver of these revelations ? 



24 



The Peculiarity of the 



III 

The Personally Living God of Israel 

The correlate to this knowledge of God by 
some persons forms the God who makes him- 
self known to them. This God is absolutely 
personal. This yields a second characteristic 
whereby this religion differs from those of 
cognate nations which were in part outward- 
ly alike. There doubtless existed an inner 
relationship between Jehovah, the God of 
Israel, and the national deities of the Edom- 
ites, Moabites, Ammonites, Arameans. A 
closer examination shows that these nations 
too were not far from being monotheistic. 
It is an erroneous idea of some modern 
scholars who think that from the beginning 
these tribes had only a particular god in 
view whose powers, according to their ideas, 
were confined to the narrow limits of their 
territory. 

This view is connected with the assump- 
tion that belief in one God is generally the 
result only of a long historical development* 



Religion of the Bible 25 

From belief in demons (Animism) developed 
in time belief in gods, and from this finally 
belief in God. This hypothesis is neither 
supported by history nor by the condition of 
savages of the present time. In the first in- 
stance we find in China belief in a supreme 
God in heaven as early as the coexisting 
belief in spirits or ancestral cult. But even 
among wholly savage African and American 
tribes one was surprised to find a widely 
spread belief in a supernatural God, in a 
God plainly in heaven, to whom not seldom 
is ascribed the creation of the universe, and 
who is also not wholly lacking in ethical 
character. I refer for the Africans to my 
book (Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte) , p. 
745 sqq* 5 f or the American red men to p. 
775 S( ¥l- 5 f or the Mongol-Tartaric nations 
which are addicted to Shamanism (spirit- 
cult) to p. 89 ; here we only quote two other 
examples : 

The missionary Allegret, a careful ob- 
server, reported at the Religious Historical 
Congress in Basel, 1904, about the "Fan" 
people on the Congo, who had newly come 
from the bush and up to this time had neither 
been in contact with Christianity nor with 



26 The Peculiarity of the 

Islamism. This tribe is so little civilized that 
anthropophagy is practised by it ; but besides 
the customary superstitious notions and cus- 
toms which it has in common with the Ban- 
tu-tribes, Allegret discovered in time and in- 
deed among the older people and those mem- 
bers of the tribe who remained more in the 
interior of the country, an ancient belief in 
God which is expressed in the divine name 
Nzame (just as many other Bantu-tribes). 
Of this God attributes are predicated in 
terms belonging to a language now no longer 
used, like: "The Almighty, the supreme 
judge, the king of kings, the father of life." 
This God, which the "Fan" people before 
they met the whites represented to them- 
selves as being black, but to which they now 
ascribe a white color, forsook them, accord- 
ing to their account, because of their dis- 
obedience. 1 

A second example from an entirely differ- 
ent ethnographical territory, may be taken 
from the Australasian Negroes. These are 
classed as the lowest race of men. Compar- 
ing structure of body and carriage they are 



1 Allegret' s notices are given completely in the Revue 
de L'Histoire des Religions, 1906, pp. 1 sqq. 



Religion of the Bible 27 

said to bear a resemblance to apes beyond 
all others. In civilization they stand just as 
degraded. They have no metals, no bows, 
no pottery, no fixed dwellings. In regard to 
religion they have long been quoted as tribes 
which had no real religion but a wild Anim- 
ism. But Dampier, the first European to 
discover them, having been driven by a 
storm to their coast in 1688, has pointed out 
that they were always without the two upper 
incisors. He praised their unselfishness, al- 
though they were the most miserable people 
he knew, in that they shared everything 
among themselves, so that the old and weak 
among them never suffered need. An unex- 
pected light has now been thrown upon these 
meager notices since these savages have be- 
come better known. In the first place it has 
been ascertained that all these tribes worship 
a highest being, called Darumulun or Bunjil, 
commonly Biamban (Lord) or Papang 
(Father). This God, who is also considered 
as the creator, is benevolent and kind, but 
very severe against the transgressors of the 
laws and injunctions prevalent in the tribes. 
The real name of God should only be men- 
tioned in the Bora, that is, in his mysteries. 



28 The Peculiarity of the 

An image of him was used in these mysteries, 
but it was destroyed after the act of conse- 
cration. Before this image of the god, the 
young people were made acquainted with the 
religious injunctions: reverence for age, 
avoidance of all inordinate sexual desires, 
etc. At the same time their stomachs were 
thoroughly worked to cast out eager desire 
and selfishness ; the breaking out of the front 
teeth, which act also belonged to this drastic 
religious instruction, had undoubtedly a like 
significance ; the beast-of-prey nature in man 
was to be removed thereby. These rites, 
which according to what has been stated, 
must have been peculiar to these Australa- 
sians long before their contact w T ith Euro- 
peans, prove again that a very primitive re- 
ligious degree may contain high elements of 
a knowledge of God. So-called Animism by 
no means excludes the worship of a Father- 
God and Creator, and it might also exercise 
ethical influence in the noblest sense of the 
word. If by Animism one understands be- 
lief in countless spirits, God can be distin- 
guished from them in the most positive man- 
ner, and, as Andrew Lang has demonstrated, 
it is an undemonstrable hypothesis that is 



Religion of the Bible 29 



given out from them. 1 It has, for instance, 
often been thought that the idea of the high- 
est God has developed from the analogy of 
the human chiefs and rulers, as if these nat- 
ural men had found it necessary to supply 
also the realm of spirits with a regent. But 
this worship of a God in heaven is found 
also among such African tribes which have 
no kings and hardly chiefs, as among these 
Australians, where political rule is very little 
developed. 

Reverting from this glance at the lowest 
peoples to the more nobly endowed Semites, 
we have no reason to oppose the belief that 
among them from time immemorial the 
notion of a universal deity, ruling every- 
thing, existed; of an El which can also be 
paraphrased by Baal (Lord), Melech(king), 
Adonai (ruler), and other names of a "high- 
est God" as Melchizedek worshiped him 
(Gen. 14. 18), standing above lesser gods. 
The different Baalim of the Canaanites were 
not originally mere local genii or demons, 
but offshoots of a general heavenly deity 
which, under the name of Baal same-m, is 
already attested as one of the oldest Phoeni- 

*See A. Lang, The Making of Religion, 1898, pp. 189 sqq. 



30 The Peculiarity of the 

cian inscriptions. 1 One may also see how 
these Baalim show so many relations to the 
sun which certainly could not have been in- 
vented subsequently. Does one seriously 
imagine that these tribes should have been 
so narrow-minded as to believe that their 
sun-god which they saw daily completing his 
sovereign course over the world, manifesting 
his power, was only limited to the few square 
miles which their tribe inhabited? The 
actual limitation was the result of the politi- 
cal relation of the god to the individual tribe, 
as well as of his endowment with special 
local predicates and its worship under differ- 
ent images. But the consciousness of its uni- 
versality was never given up, and it asserted 
itself in this that over the localized and 
specialized gods, one easily put again a 
supreme god of a general character, as the 
Arabs before Mohammed put their altar over 
the individual tribal deities and fetiches. 

And yet, even aside from ethical differ- 
ence, there exists an essential difference be- 
tween the gods of the neighboring, closely 
related tribes and the notion of the God of 
ancient Israel. It consisted in this, that 

1 Orelli, L c, p. 232 sq.; Bantsch, 1. c, p. 40. 



Religion of the Bible 31 



Jehovah, in his powerfully expressed person- 
ality, is held to be entirely another God than 
the deity among those other nations. The 
deities of the Canaanites, Arameans, etc., be- 
sides the Babylonians and Assyrians, had 
something indefinite, dissolving. Hence they 
could easily divide into male and female 
halves ; could, as has been stated above, in- 
crease through political and cultic peculiari- 
ties to a plurality and turn again into one 
another. They were frequently seen to- 
gether in a single phenomenon (sensuous 
heaven, light, sun), which invites the setting 
up of a supplementary analogue (earth, dark- 
ness, moon, etc. ) . Since, however, one was 
semi-conscious of its more general character, 
its contemplation is also connected with dif- 
ferent phenomena (for instance, w T ith the 
sun and at the same time with a certain 
planet) ; and finally this worship of the most 
glorious phenomena strove for the worship 
of a more impersonal natural whole, as the 
Babylonian priest-religion clearly showed. 

In Israel Jehovah remained one and the 
same indivisible God. True, his spirit or 
his name, or his face, was distinguished from 
himself ; but from this originated no new 



32 The Peculiarity of the 

deities, as in Phoenicia, where the goddess 
Astarte was called "the name of Baal/' thus 
being an emanation of the god, or in 
Carthage, where the goddess Tanit is called 
"the face of Baal/' 1 If we ask for the rea- 
son why the deity of the Israelites did not 
multiply in like manner and its personality 
never obliterated itself, we must point in the 
first place to the fact that as we have seen 
Jehovah appeared unto some personalities 
like Abram, Moses, and ever and ever mani- 
fested himself to some leading men. In the 
second place he manifested himself ener- 
getically as a living God who enters into life 
as none of the gods of Aram or Edom. But 
these manifestations could never have been 
understood as such unless now and then men 
had been present like a Moses, Samuel, Eli- 
jah, etc., who added the word to the deed 
and explained to the people the often strange 
acts of this God. This God who appeared 
in absolute personality with power suffered 
no other beside him. For "goddess" the 
Hebrew language has not even a word. The 
association of a female partner would appear 
as an abomination to every Israelite who 

1 Orelli, 1. c, pp. 240 and 242. 



Religion of the Bible 33 

had grown up in the religion of Moses, 
inoffensive as this notion was to all Semitic 
tribes of remote antiquity. 

We nowhere find in the Bible a disposi- 
tion to substitute for the personally con- 
scious God a semi-conscious or unconscious 
power of nature or power of fate. This per- 
sonality of God is an inner bond which holds 
the Bible together from the first to the last 
leaf, whereas the progressive world-percep- 
tion of other nations easily led to the putting 
of a supreme, mere impersonal power in 
place of the desultory, individual deities; 
as was done by the Egyptian and Babylonian 
astronomers and the keen thinkers on the 
other hand among the Brahmins. In the 
Old Testament we find the opposite. 

I must also expressly oppose those Assyri- 
ologists who assert that the biblical narra- 
tors of Genesis or of the books of Judges or 
Samuel or even of the books of the Kings, 
had in view an astral-scheme, an order of the 
stars, according to which earthly events were 
ordered. Whether astronomical figures form 
the basis of certain primitive forms in Gene- 
sis, for instance whether the number twelve 
of the sons of Jacob is connected with the 



34 The Peculiarity of the 

signs of the zodiac, is an archaeological ques- 
tion which we will not argue here. What 
I oppose is, that the narrators intended such 
a connection or presupposed such as already 
held by their hearers and readers. That, for 
instance, the biblical narrator who speaks of 
Abram, how he went from Aram to Canaan, 
should have thought thereby of the moon- 
god and intended by this to remind his 
hearers and readers of the wandering moon ; 
or that, when he tells of Joseph in prison, he 
had in view the god Tammuz, who was kept 
imprisoned in the lower world, etc.— these 
are entries which radically destroy the spir- 
itual and religious stamp of these simple, 
unconstrained narratives. The more thor- 
oughly the famous and ingenious astral doc- 
trine of the ancient Babylonians is pro- 
pounded, according to which every earthly 
event has its heavenly type in the motions 
and relations of the stars, the more force- 
fully are we impressed by the very great 
contrast between this view of the world and 
the Old Testament where the sovereign God, 
Jehovah, freely rules in nature and history 
without being dependent on any scheme. 
To this must also be added the ethical 



Religion of the Bible 35 

element. This is by no means absent from 
the old-Semitic deity (See Gen. 19 and 20. 
11). Where the "fear of God" prevailed in 
such a tribe, the right of the stranger was 
also regarded, who was not indeed the pro- 
tege of a local tribal god but of the general 
deity. In the Babylonian version of the 
Deluge, the motive for destroying the human 
race seemed to be its wickedness. The god 
Ea upbraided the god Bel only because he 
destroyed the human race without discrimi- 
nation instead of punishing the individual 
sinner for his own sin, the wicked for his 
wickedness, and from the Babylonian peni- 
tential psalms we clearly see that one saw 
the cause of suffering not only in the dis- 
favor of a somehow offended God, but also 
in offences against the moral law. Of such 
a law the Babylonians had a consciousness 
as highly developed as the ancient Egyptians, 
according to a chapter of their book of the 
dead. But not only did the conception of the 
magic relation between the divine and earth- 
ly sphere check among both peoples the 
moral influence which religion should have 
exercised, religion itself was too much con- 
fused with nature. 



36 The Peculiarity of the 

Where the deity is affiliated with nature 
it easily loses its ethically sublime character. 
Already the division of the deity into per- 
sonal plurality became also fatal for it in 
this respect. From the plurality of gods 
arises opposition, and where the gods them- 
selves are in a state of mutual warfare, the 
moral authority which they should have over 
against man is greatly weakened. How 
could the deluge make an overwhelming im- 
pression on the sinner when the greatest 
gods, Bel and Ea, afterward quarreled about 
it, whether it would not have been better had 
that judgment not taken place, not to speak 
of the passionate complaints of Istar or the 
demeanor of other gods who for fear 
crouched like dogs at the threshold of 
heaven? We see in these myths as in the 
poems of the Hindoos, Greeks, Germans, 
etc., that with the interweaving of the deity 
into the nature, its moral holiness was soon 
lost. True that for the religious conscious- 
ness these controversies, largely invented in 
mythical tales, receded in the cult, but here 
too they annoyingly asserted themselves 
since man had not to deal with one holy 
authority but with an indefinite number of 



Religion of the Bible 37 

powers whose interests were divided. One 
complained, perhaps, that he did not know 
which god he had offended, or he made use 
of the weakness of these gods in order to 
throw the favor of one into the scale of the 
other ; worse than this was the natural con- 
fusion of the deity which betrayed itself in 
the very cult of these Semitic nations. This 
confusion was served by giving free vent to 
natural impulses, and again with killing the 
natural life (human sacrifices). Lust and 
cruelty celebrated their orgies in honor of a 
deity which had been divested of its higher 
moral consecration. It is known that the 
Israelites were surrounded by such specifical- 
ly heathenish vices (prostitution of women 
and men, human sacrifices, especially infant 
sacrifices) and that they often took hold of 
the people owing to their tendency toward 
sensuality. But these things were an abom- 
ination to the holy God from Sinai, and were 
again and again cast out when his faithful 
professors succeeded in awakening the peo- 
ple to fidelity toward him. Jehovah was 
holy according to his nature, that is, he was 
superior to the earthly human and especially 
a consuming fire for all iniquity and sin. 



38 The Peculiarity of the 

Nothing is so adapted to bring out this 
superiority of Jehovah over other Semitic 
gods than a comparison of the historically- 
related Babylonian myths which were, how- 
ever, animated by an entirely different spirit. 
This has been sufficiently demonstrated in 
the brochures of S. Oettli, Ed. Koenig, R. 
Kittel, A. Jeremias, F. Hommel, and others, 
called forth by the sensational assertions of 
the opposite in the Babel-Bible controversy. 
At present, however, everyone can convince 
himself of it when he compares the now 
accessible Babylonian texts with the biblical. 
Of this only one example : 

It is said that the Adapa-myth 1 is another 
form of the biblical narrative of the fall. 
This Adapa is a man of primeval time, cre- 
ated by the god Ea and endowed by him with 
wisdom but not with eternal life. He min- 
istered to this his god as priest in the city 
of Eridu. Fishing one day he was cast into 
the sea by the bird Zu, the south wind ; but 
out of revenge he broke its wings so that it 
could not blow for seven days. Anu, the 
highest god of heaven, became angry and 



1 Alfred J eremias, Das alte Testament in dem Lichte des 
alten Orients, p. 72 sq. 



Religion of the Bible 39 

called Adapa to account; Anu exclaimed: 
"No mercy!"; yet he suffered himself to be 
appeased by the doorkeepers Tammuz and 
Giszida, and ordered them to prepare a meal 
for Adapa and to give him a festive raiment 
and oil for anointing. Adapa accepted the 
dress and oil but refused food and drink at 
the suggestion of his god Ea which had said 
to him: "Food of death they will offer to 
thee, eat not thereof ! W ater of death they 
will offer to thee, drink not thereof !" Anu 
was surprised at this refusal since he had 
caused that food of life and water of life 
should be given him, to give him life eternal ; 
thus Adapa forfeited this gift. 

One may consider Adapa as the primitive 
man, and as in Genesis 3 we may here find 
an explanation why immortality was refused 
to man — but the ethical inferiority of this 
legend over against the wondrous narrative 
in Genesis 3 is obvious. Whether the good 
god of the depth, Ea, grudged his beloved 
immortality, thus playing the false part of 
the serpent, or whether he trusted not the 
fickle god of heaven — at any rate man 
became the victim of obedience, not of 
disobedience toward his creator, and lost 



40 The Peculiarity of the 

the immortality intended for him in conse- 
quence of the miserable disunion of the 
gods. 

With Jehovah, the God of ancient Israel, 
truth, righteousness, kindness are inalienable 
attributes. Moral perfection necessarily be- 
longs to his nature. As such he already ap- 
peared in the oldest leaves of the Bible which 
contained pre-Mosaic matter. He punished 
pride (Gen. n. 6 sq.), violation of the right 
of hospitality (Gen. 19. 1 sqq.), the uni- 
versal corruption of sin (Gen. 6. 5 sqq.), 
but did not forget the righteous one who, 
like Noah or Lot, he saved from destruction. 
We admit that the ruling of this God had 
in itself yet much that is inexplicable, in- 
scrutable, and that his grace, like his wrath, 
could not always be traced back to moral 
propositions, but might sometimes have the 
semblance of arbitrariness. But this is 
entirely different from the assertion that he 
acted capriciously and unjustly. His vota- 
ries had themselves cast this reproach far 
from him (Gen. 18. 25). Conscious, indeed, 
that they often failed to understand his com- 
mands, nevertheless they could not imagine 
God other than as good, and the more they 



Religion of the Bible 41 



developed themselves ethically, the purer 
they apprehended the nature of their God 
whom they knew to be the sum of ethical 
perfection, and that every man stood in his 
sight as sinful and therefore impure. 



42 The Peculiarity of the 



IV 

Development of the Knowledge of 
God in Israel 

Development in Old Testament knowledge 
of God there certainly was. But whereas 
we noticed among the Babylonians, Egyp- 
tians, Greeks, Hindoos, and other nations, 
that with the purification of religion personal 
life in the conception of the deity recedes and 
vanishes in the minds of the initiated, in 
Israel we find the reverse. God is, was, and 
remains the One who is sharply differenti- 
ated from the world, the / who came to man 
with a "Thou" and demanded from the 
people : "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy might." This required a 
personal attitude of the individual heart 
toward him who comprises in himself full- 
ness of personal life, but so that neither the 
unity of his consciousness nor the energy of 
his will shall suffer thereby. Should the 
childlike anthropomorphisms which are 
found especially in the oldest leaves of the 



Religion of the Bible 43 

Jehovah document be stripped off, the an- 
thropopathies remain, yea, they are increased 
to the utmost by Hosea, who looked deeper 
into the heart of God than any of his prede- 
cessors. And though one should endeavor 
to correct occasionally the pathological min- 
gling (see Hos. 11. 9), the personal is re- 
tained as an inalienable peculiarity of the 
God revealed to Israel. Where reference to 
a personal God recedes and religion is more 
pleased with the observance of legally con- 
stituted ritual, its decay is also obvious as in 
the legalism of the post-exilic and later rab- 
binic Judaism. 

The ascending development, however, 
which the Old Testament religion underwent 
consists in this, that not only was the idea 
of God himself purified and spiritualized, the 
high perceptions of a Moses being improved 
by later men of God, but the relation of the 
congregation to this God became also more 
personal. 

From the beginning the religion of Jeho- 
vah was indeed not a matter of a certain 
caste or body; it was not so that only the 
"initiated/ ' distinguished by speculative 
power, could have perceived the nature of 



44 The Peculiarity of the 

this God and his true qualities. As little did 
this knowledge form the content of "mys- 
teries" to which the initiated only were ad- 
mitted. Jehovah demanded acknowledg- 
ment from all people, all estates, sexes and 
ages, even from bondservants and strangers 
who dwelt among the people. This essen- 
tially distinguished his worship from that 
"monotheism" which one may find at its 
best in the speculative formulas of Babylo- 
nian and Egyptian priests. The god whom 
they saw in high contemplation was on this 
account already different from the Israelitish 
because it was not objected to that the 
common people worshiped the deity in a 
number of partial phenomena. 

Only in an isolated manner do we find in 
those religions the claim of a god to autoc- 
racy. Thus in Egypt, especially under 
Amenhotep (Amenophis) IV, about 1400 
B. C, who in opposition to the Theban 
priesthood and the powerful god Amon, in- 
sisted upon the sole worship of the sun-god 
in the form of the winged disc of the sun. 
On this account he was considered an apos- 
tatized heretic. It is more likely that he 
borrowed his ideas from the Semites than 



Religion of the Bible 45 

that Moses, whose God Jehovah had no rela- 
tion to the sun, should have learned from 
him. According to E. Naville his more 
political motives induced him to adopt the 
rite of Heliopolis without forming, however, 
a higher notion of his god than the other 
Egyptians. 

Recently one has imagined that he per- 
ceived an analogy to this Egyptian struggle 
for monotheism in the commendation of 
the God Nabu (Nebo) by the Assyrian king 
Ramman Nirari (about 790 B. C.), and he 
considered it not as accidental that shortly 
after this time lived that Israelitish prophet, 
Jonah, the son of Amittas, who preached the 
true God at Nineveh, and that Amos ap- 
peared at Bethel proclaiming a purified 
monotheism. But we cannot attach much 
weight to this coincidence. We read indeed 
in the inscription of the famous Nebo-statue 
of that Assyrian king at the end: "Man 
of coming times, trust in Nebo! trust not 
in any other god!" 1 

A tendency to perceive the divine in a 
centralized form, we also meet with in the 



1 Orelli, 1. c, p. 185 sq, 



46 The Peculiarity of the 

ancient Babylonian moon-cult, 1 also in sun 
worship. 2 But aside from this, that that 
recommendation of the god Nebo might also 
have other motives (sympathy with a cer- 
tain priest-party, etc.), Amos would certain- 
ly have strongly opposed the presumption to 
perceive his God in a form as presented by 
the Nebostatue. Jehovah was absolutely an 
entirely different being ; and the appearance 
of the herdsman of Tekoa was not caused 
by a theological wave which had brought 
purer ideas from the interior of Asia. As 
he himself vividly describes it, he was called 
by his God from the flock to his prophetical 
office with an impetuosity which he could 
withstand as little as one can guard himself 
from terror when suddenly the roar of a 
lion is heard in immediate vicinity (see 
Amos 7. 14 sq. and 3.8). It is not a learned 
priest who is imbued with foreign influences 
and brings a new teaching to his people, but 
a common man of the people w r ho was so 
apprehended by his God that he had the 
courage to oppose the heads of the secular 
and spiritual government. He sounded the 



1 Orelli, p. 182 sq., the Hymn to the Moon-god. 

2 Ibid., p. 192 sq. 



Religion of the Bible 



47 



trumpet of alarm to warn them of the judg- 
ment of that God who has always proved 
himself to be the all-powerful and holy one 
in Israel. 

That this God had power over all nations, 
he by no means proclaims as something new 
but recalls the fact as something old. This 
only must be admitted, that as the political 
horizon expanded at that time, so also this 
divine ruler assumed grander dimensions be- 
fore the eyes of the nation. The particular- 
ism of restricted isolation was roughly 
broken through by events, and one learned 
to look also at the designed leading of other 
nations by Jehovah. That it served a large- 
ly concerned plan with a positive object in 
view, Isaiah made especially clear, and this 
purpose or goal of the history of the world 
has since been kept in view by the prophets 
in an ever more insistent manner. The 
Mosaic God, in spite of his terrific majesty, 
revealed that grace and mercy were of his 
innermost essence (Exod. 34. 6 sq.). More 
and more the knowledge grew that the 
nations existed not simply to glorify God 
as objects of his wrathful judgment, or to 
serve him as instruments of judgment on 



48 The Peculiarity of the 

his own people, but that they were also 
objects of the loving care of God and were 
destined after their obstinacy was broken 
down to serve the true God who would also 
gloriously manifest himself in Israel for 
them, in order that they should take part 
in his blessings and saving mercies. The 
very Babylonian exile which on the one 
hand served to fill the Jews with an insupera- 
ble repugnance to the idolatrous aberrations 
of heathenism, brought them on the other 
hand into closer contact with the human 
race outside and contributed no little to the 
fact that illuminated minds among them 
conceived the religion of Jehovah in a more 
universal manner. 



Religion of the Bible 49 



V 

Development of the Relation of the 
Old Testament Church to God 

Contemporaneously with this development 
a progressive individualization of religion 
was effectuated. It showed itself more as 
a relation of God to individual members of 
the congregation, whereas formerly the in- 
dividual receded behind the national. In 
this too it has often been generalized too 
much and judged too categorically. It has 
been asserted that in older times the Israelit- 
ish religion, in general, knew of no relation 
of the individual to Jehovah but only of the 
tribe or people to God. Only the people 
were the object of divine love, care, and 
sympathizing guidance. The individual 
could not confidently expect it in private or 
personal matters ; this was an exaggeration 
of a true perception. How God cared for 
the individual even in the smallest things 
and punishes the sins of the individual, the 
oldest patriarchal stories have already 
proved. One could not put aside reference 



50 The Peculiarity of the 

to them with the consideration that an 
Abram, Isaac, Jacob, as types of the future 
people, had to stand in just the same rela- 
tion to Jehovah as the whole people after- 
ward stood. In the consciousness of the 
pious Israelites these fathers were not com- 
mon ideas but personalities of flesh and 
blood, and their example showed how Jeho- 
vah dealt with his votaries, how he visited 
them in mercy or punished their shortcom- 
ings. That he thus stood to them in a cer- 
tain personal relation and treated them in- 
dividually was understood as a matter of 
course. In those family-stories (history of 
Joseph) we find overwhelming evidences 
that God not only keenly observed the indi- 
vidual acts of men and rewarded or punished 
them according to incorruptible justice, but 
also so directed them in a most specific way 
that they would finally serve his plan. Thus 
migrating men of Israel certainly encour- 
aged themselves by Jacob's example whom 
his God so faithfully preserved abroad and 
helped him to fortune and prosperity. And 
the women in ancient Israel, a Hannah or 
the Shunammite, the friend of Elisha, in 
their domestic concerns and matrimonial 



Religion of the Bible 51 

cares could not think otherwise of God's 
rule than as was told of the wives of Abram, 
Isaac, and Jacob, where affecting traits are 
not wanting which serve to show that God 
cared also for the tender feelings of a wife 
and mother and espoused their cause (Gen. 
29. 31 ; 21. 16 sq.). 

It lies in the nature of the thing that in 
the historical books of the Old Testament 
as a rule we only hear of God's w r ays with 
the people as a whole. Family life is only 
mentioned where it became of importance 
for all Israel. In like manner the prophets 
as a rule were only concerned about the wel- 
fare of the people. Nevertheless it is hardly 
correct when one imagines that men of God 
like Samuel, Nathan, Isaiah, and others, con- 
sidered public affairs only as worthy of spe- 
cial illumination by God's prophetical word. 
One certainly asked of them instruction also 
in private affairs, instruction not merely in 
the sense of a legal decision, but also of 
direction, counsel, and comfort in perplexing 
questions and under heavy personal inflic- 
tions. With what loving care such a man of 
God could even enter into the little needs of 
the private life and remove them through 



52 The Peculiarity of the 

God's light and power, the history of Elisha 
shows. It has been asserted against a "min- 
isterial" activity of this man that in those 
narratives from the colonies of the prophets 
the question was only of alleviating outward 
needs (in the present pastoral case it occu- 
pied perhaps no less a place), but the main 
thing here is this, that the individual life 
also (not merely the communal or national 
life) was governed by God's powers of 
grace; and when, as we accidentally learn, 
the same prophet on the new moons or sab- 
baths gathered around his dwelling on 
Mount Carmel the religious people from the 
neighborhood (2 Kings 4. 23), he there 
spoke to them in the name of his God cer- 
tainly not only of national affairs, but 
entered also into their personal, spiritual 
wants. 

It is, however, correct that in the course 
of time the relation between God and the 
congregation deepened and became thereby 
more personal and individual. The small 
communities of the faithful which Elisha 
gathered around him, in part in the groups 
of the prophets, were at that time a kind of 
ecclesiolce in ecclesia; such existed before 



Religion of the Bible 53 

and constituted at the time of Elijah those 
seven thousand who bowed not their knee 
unto Baal. Here already tribal relationship 
or consanguinity with national theoretical 
recollections no longer formed or condi- 
tioned communion, at least not such alone, 
but belief in the ancient deeds of Jehovah. 
Allegiance to him was decisive and also that 
communion which the prophetic word had 
established and fostered. This was the 
kernel of the people of God which, according 
to Isaiah and all his successors, was destined 
to form the "remnant" of the future, a rem- 
nant in which the national church should live 
on through all the judgments of God and 
extend into the time of final salvation in 
order to realize some day the idea of the 
theocracy. 

In these prophetical hopes of the future 
the later so-called Messiah occupies a promi- 
nent place. In this also the strong tendency 
of this religion toward personal develop- 
ment expresses itself. The living and ruling 
"anointed of Jehovah" occupied in religious 
respect already an important position; and 
though analogies are found for it elsewhere, 
also it is peculiar to the Israelitish religion 



54 The Peculiarity of the 

that it expects its consummation from a king 
of the future, in whom the Godhead and 
humanity shall meet the closest relation. 
This hope is not connected with a future 
priest but with a scion of the house of David,, 
a king after the heart of Jehovah. In him 
Israel would somehow be personified in 
order to enter upon the closest union with 
God thinkable. When the people in their 
representative head should be so harmoni- 
ously united w r ith the Lord, the serenity of 
God's pleasure in his people and the pros- 
perity of the latter comes of itself. 

It is true with this son of David, rich in 
honors, there is a remarkable contrast in 
the picture of the "servant of Jehovah," 
who is delineated in certain portions of the 
second book of Isaiah (Isa. 42. 1-4; 49. 1-6; 
50. 4-9; 52. 13-53). But these very peculiar 
descriptions of the perfect servant form a 
grand proof of the effort of this religion 
toward personification. For the idea of this 
servant and his office proceeds very properly 
from the calling of Israel as the people of 
Jehovah. This people were called to the 
service which the servant rendered, but 
proved themselves very unfit for it. Thus 



Religion of the Bible 55 

comes before the eye of the seer a figure 
who performs it without fault. That this 
figure cannot be identical with the people, 
present or future, is most clearly seen from 
passages like Isa. 42. 6 sq. ; 49. 6; 53. 8, 
where the people appeared rather as the 
object of his deliverance and atonement. In 
the picture, delineated in a strictly personal 
manner, a plurality of godly, prophetically 
active sufferers and confessors might at most 
be uniformly comprised, but should one have 
asked the seer who outlined the picture 
whether he expected the fulfillment through 
an individual or a collective plurality, ac- 
cording to my conviction he would have 
answered in the former sense. For this 
view speaks not only the analogy of the Is- 
raelitish history, where in the greatest epochs 
an individual formed the medium through 
which the whole work of the Lord was 
mediated, thus Moses and Joshua, Samuel, 
David ; but the servant himself is very clear- 
ly made knowable as a second Moses or 
Joshua, for instance, Isa. 49. 6, and also the 
references to the Hope which one expected 
from the future son of David, are by no 
means wanting, as Sellin has especially 



56 The Peculiarity of the 

proved. It is therefore a scion who pro- 
ceeded from the people but by far surpass- 
ing them in dignity and disposition, who 
would help the people to a right attitude 
before God and at the same time bring the 
distant inhabitants of the world to an 
acknowledgment of the revelation of Je- 
hovah. 

The many-voiced echo of prophetical rev- 
elations we find in the Psalms. These allow 
us to look into a more living, more affect- 
ing, more personally reciprocal relation be- 
tween Jehovah and his worshipers than the 
hymns of the Riga Veda, or the Babylonian 
penitential litanies with which they have 
already been compared. It is also a mistake 
to assume that the / of the Psalms is always 
collective, spoken in the name of the congre- 
gation as has recently been done again by 
prominent specialists. True, the personifica- 
tion of Israel as a national or cultic unit in 
preexilic as in postexilic time is nothing 
unusual. See the "Thou" in the Decalogue 
and in the Aaronic blessing (Num. 6. 24- 
26). Why should a singer not speak, pray, 
praise in the name of his congregation ? In 
the Psalms of Solomon, those apocryphal 



Religion of the Bible 57 

hymns from the time of Pompey, this is 
doubtless the case. But the prayer of Ha- 
bakkuk (Hab. 3) speaks, after verse 14, in 
the name of the congregation. In the 
Lamentations of Jeremiah such seems also 
to be the case; and in the prophets we fre- 
quently find examples or statements of such 
hymnological performance of the congrega- 
tion where it speaks of itself with I. Such 
hymns may also be expected in the Psalms ; 
but it is an unauthorized preconception to 
suppose such there throughout, for there are 
hymns in which he who prays is clearly 
enough distinguished from the congregation 
for whose edification he gratefully wishes to 
make known his personal experience of sal- 
vation; see Psalm 22 (verse 26), 40 (verse 
9 sq.), and others. Outer experiences, and 
inner feelings especially, are very often too 
individualistic not to be wholly of a personal 
nature ; and as a rule those individual songs 
of prayer very clearly detach themselves 
from the cultic hymns mostly belonging to 
the later postexilic time, which were evi- 
dently composed for the religious service of 
the congregation. Even if one takes a song 
like Psalm 23, where the question might 



58 The Peculiarity of the 

perhaps arise whether it was sung in the 
name of a righteous individual or of the 
godly congregation, feelings of communion 
w r ith God are here (as in so many of these 
glorious hymns of prayer, and also in the 
penitential hymns, Psa. 32, 51) so devout 
and warm that, at any rate, they must have 
been first experienced by the individual be- 
fore they could have been put into the mouth 
of others. Thus the Psalter is a rich source 
of proofs how personally and individually 
this Old Testament religion developed in the 
congregation. And these proofs belong to 
many centuries. The statement supported 
by the entire tradition that King David had 
given an impulse to psalmody, deserves by 
no means the skeptical refusal which today 
is frequently bestowed upon it. Whoever 
reads the description of David's behavior at 
the rebellion of his son Absalom (2 Sam. 
15. 19), which was certainly composed by a 
contemporary, will at the outset believe this 
king, with his fervent and tender as well as 
truly pious feeling, capable of such lyrical 
Prayers as Psa. 3, 4, 51, and others. And 
whoever knows the prophets Amos, Hosea, 
Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, cannot doubt that 



Religion of the Bible 59 

the preexilic Israel had its cultic lyric poetry, 
and he will not be surprised to hear in Psa. 
137. 3, that it was known in Babylon. Our 
present Psalter is indeed the hymn-book of 
the second temple, not in the sense that all 
these hymns were composed after the exile, 
but rather that just as in our church hymn- 
books, an old treasure of hymns was received 
into it when many things may have been 
changed in language or otherwise through 
frequent use. 

This much may safely be ascertained from 
the Psalter as from other sources, that per- 
sonal communion of the individual with God 
was at all times very active among pious 
Israelites. True, the hieratic apparatus was 
still highly valued ; but already in the older 
time, just as in this, we find close com- 
munion of pious individuals with God. And 
progressive prophetical revelation developed 
this personal relation ever more freely. 
Think of it, how the great prophets of the 
eighth century abolished sacrifice as non- 
essential, yea, as rather impeding true atti- 
tude toward God; how Jeremiah repre- 
sented the covenant-sign of circumcision as 
worthless unless the ears and hearts were 



60 The Peculiarity of the 

circumcised; how the same prophet de- 
stroyed the trust in the temple as the holy 
habitation of God and considered it as un- 
necessary in a better future (Jer. 3. 16), 
even the sacred palladium of the Ark of 
the Covenant, when the Mosaic covenant 
should be replaced by a New Covenant 
which would be founded not upon outwardly 
written tables but upon changed hearts (31. 
31 sqq.). But let me also observe how 
Ezekiel, who likewise so strongly empha- 
sized change of heart as the condition of 
future right relation with God (Ezek. 36. 
25 sqq.), at the same time asserted as none 
else did the individual treatment of the indi- 
vidual by the righteous God and thereby 
also most emphatically enjoined upon human 
pastorship its responsibility (Ezek. 18. 1 

sqq.; 33- * S( W-)- 

It is evident how much such teachings 

could contribute to the independence of 
religious personalities in the congregation; 
only it is a mistake to assume that such veri- 
ties, when once apprehended by the indi- 
vidual, must of themselves become the com- 
mon property of the people or of the right- 
eous. The external character of piety which 



Religion of the Bible 6i 



the following centuries brought shows the 
reverse. Religious cognitions do not evolve 
like technical inventions and practices; on 
this account advance in this department is 
neither constant nor rectilinear. But there 
came an epoch for Judaism when all the 
noblest sap which had come up in the tribe 
produced a blossom in which, humanly 
speaking, the tribe surpassed itself. 



62 



The Peculiarity of the 



VI 

The Perfect Bearer of God-Communion 
— Christ 

Jesus Christ professed the God of Moses 
and of the prophets. So far he brought no 
new religion. But being united with God 
in a unique manner, he brought a new one 
by bringing about through his person a new 
revelation of men to God, and thus made 
this relation more personal. 

He himself called this God his Father and 
by so doing attested a unique connection in 
which he stood with God, a relation, which 
in contradistinction to all men, even to his 
disciples, must belong to him. The distance 
between the Master and his disciples of 
which we spoke above (p. 19) becomes here 
the greatest, hence his authority, which is 
the highest. Not only according to his own 
statements but also according to the claims 
of his appearance, Jesus stood in such a near 
relation to God that the terms "inspiration," 
"revelation," fail to convey the full idea. 
God did not merely appear unto him, did 



Religion of the Bible 63 

not merely reveal himself to him, did not 
merely send his Spirit into him, but over 
against the world and men he knew himself 
as one with God. The future "theocracy" 
was at the same time his kingdom. "He 
that seeth me seeth the Father." But no 
trace of pantheism is found here as if he 
could no more distinguish the / and Thou. 
The Father is so consciously and clearly dis- 
tinguished from his own I, that on a certain 
occasion he could also say : "Not my will, 
but thine be done." And whenever he spoke 
of the Father it was done with a fervor, an 
unreserved love, a childlike trust, that one 
must feel how real for him was this personal 
life of the Father. Deeper yet than all the 
prophets he knew the nature of God as 
personal. The attitude of Jesus toward God 
is without analogy among the religious 
geniuses whom humanity has produced. 
The meaning of religion has obtained in him 
a peerless perfection. Here we have the 
perfect relation of God and man in the Son 
of man who was at the same time the Son 
of God. 

Mohammed scrupled at nothing so much 
as that God should have had a son. His 



64 The Peculiarity of the 

Allah, of whose strictly undivided unity he 
was so proud, lacked the fullness of the per- 
sonal life which was perfected in the Father 
of Jesus Christ. Allah's relation to Moham- 
med himself is much more outwardly. The 
"prophet" to whom, in the language of the 
Mohammedan theologians, Allah threw his 
revelation-sayings like shooting-stars, stood 
in no inner relation to him — with his inner 
man he had nothing to do. This is most 
obviously perceived from this, that an ethic- 
ally satisfying influence upon his person did 
not proceed from these revelations. This 
want, w 7 hich strongly contrasts his mission 
with that of the Old Testament prophets, 
and when compared with the conduct of 
Christ altogether denotes a pitiful decline, 
threw also an unfavorable light upon the 
god preached by him. This want was in 
general no less in his zealous professors. 
They too obtained no living reciprocal rela- 
tion between God and man; and where a 
mystical absorption in Allah was sought as 
in the case with the £ufi under Persian in- 
fluence, the deity dissolved pantheistically. 
Islamism was not, as its professors thought, 
the highest degree of monotheism, but 



Religion of the Bible 65 

showed that it was about to relapse into the 
naturalism of heathenism. 

Nor did Buddha, whom one is inclined to 
put by the side of Christ as the founder of a 
"universal religion/' deserve this honor. 
What induced Sakamuni to seek deliverance 
whereby he could first deliver himself and 
then all men, was evil, sickness, age, death. 
Fear of these made him an ascetic and when 
he saw that the sore Brahmanic self-affliction 
did not, after all, deliver him from the fear 
of death, he became a meditating philoso- 
pher. While meditating he imagined that 
he found the means of deliverance for all 
men in the knowledge of the four fundamen- 
tal truths whose practical result is that man 
must free himself from all lust, all desire for 
life, and therefore extricate himself from 
family ties and worldly affairs, in order to 
be released from the entire enchainment of 
causes and effects which hold man in the 
spell of the evil world. 

Already this starting-point of the mission 
of Buddha stood below that which prompted 
Jesus to redeem men. Jesus cared for some- 
thing higher than that he himself could 
escape from evil and afterward deliver 



66 The Peculiarity of the 

others from it. He cared for the kingdom 
of God; for the will of his Father. He 
perceived the root of all evil to be the 
estrangement of men from God. 

Buddha also perceived that evil had an 
ethical cause. He strongly emphasized that 
every deed, whether good or bad, is closely 
followed by its reward ; but he knew nothing 
of God, the Father. The gods of India 
were for him indifferent figures. Man 
needed no God for his deliverance ; he must 
deliver himself by keen thinking and strength 
of mind ; there is no other way. Buddhism 
preached a moral philosophy and its five 
fundamental commandments were almost 
identical with those of Moses contained in 
the second Table; but of the first Table, of 
duties toward God, Buddhism knew nothing. 
Prayer is therefore omitted; in its place is 
cosmos, contemplation, absorption into the 
unconscious which gives a blessed foretaste 
of Nirvana; the evaporation of personal 
existence and consciousness, the final hope 
of the true disciple of Buddha. 

Here we miss that which is constitutive 
for every religion, the relation of man to 
the deity. Ancient, original Buddhism 



Religion of the Bible 67 

should be called a life-philosophy rather than 
a religion. It had never become a religion 
of the people, but, like Manichseism, would 
have remained an order for the world-escap- 
ing cultured had it not experienced an essen- 
tial change in the interest of popularization, 
whereby its too highly strained idealism took 
an opposite turn. Had Buddha disdained 
every cult he now would have become an 
object of worship among a number of other 
gods associated with him. The cult became 
external, mechanical beyond anything seen 
in many religions. It is true thatSakyamuni 
should not be held responsible for this degen- 
eration, but without it Buddhism had never 
become one of the most diffused religions. 
The small elite, however, which at present 
conforms to Buddha in decided alienation 
from family and worldly affairs, has no real 
religion in its system, but an insufficient 
equivalent for it. A religion without belief 
in deity, without prayer, without hope, lacks 
all that which is necessary for religion. The 
heroic virtues, contempt of the world and of 
self-devotion, may grow also on philosoph- 
ical soil; but the love in which Buddhism 
glories must not be confounded with that of 



68 The Peculiarity of the 

the Christian. It lacks the root which the 
latter has in its faith. Only when man knows 
God as his Father, can he truly love his fel- 
low-men as his brothers. Schopenhauer has 
indeed imagined that the Buddhist love ought 
to be preferred to the Christian because it 
goes out indiscriminately also to animals; 
but in this we see rather the inferiority of 
this contemplation of the world which pro- 
ceeded from Indian naturalism. Buddhist 
love did not concern itself with the divine in 
man, it was mere sympathy with nature, and 
over and above it is strongly influenced by 
calculation. One does not really love his 
fellow-man but wishes to get rid of himself, 
and to do this he must help him. Where 
there is no positive life-aim, love becomes 
aimless. 

It would be difficult to understand how in 
our days Buddhism could be successful in 
any degree on the soil of civilized Christen- 
dom — a doctrine which neither knows how 
to satisfy religious need nor is able to put 
before man a world-task which gives some 
value to life — did we not know that many 
have made shipwreck of belief in God and 
his gospel of love concerning the world, and 



Religion of the Bible 



6 9 



consequently have fallen back 011 a wretched 
pessimism for which the profound Indian 
itinerant preacher seems to offer them a 
worthy setting. Add to this that modern 
Buddhist missionaries do not demand strict 
Buddha-discipline, with its monastic renun- 
ciation, and that over and above all the sys- 
tem is mixed with a strong admixture of 
modern aromatics, especially American spir- 
itism, and is thus made palatable for "mod- 
ern" truth. 



70 The Peculiarity of the 



VII 

The Consummation of the Congrega- 
tion Through a Personal 
Relation to Christ 

In formal respects Buddhism shows many 
points of contact with Christianity. Con- 
sideration must be especially had to this, that 
Buddha did not consider belonging to a 
nation or caste the basis for forming a con- 
gregation, but assent to his teaching and its 
observance, thus making it an entirely per- 
sonal matter. National Brahminism was 
thus developed through Sakamuni into a 
personal religion. On biblical soil Chris- 
tianity made the same progress over Juda- 
ism. 

The congregation of Christ was estab- 
lished according to another principle than 
that of the Old Testament. Not birth, not 
the law of the country or people determined 
discipleship, but the personal attitude toward 
Jesus. "Christians" (Acts it. 26; 26. 28; 
1 Pet. 4. 16), adherents of Christ, the peo- 
ple were called who believed on him. This 



Religion of the Bible 71 

"sect" was composed of a people of both 
sexes from all manner of origin, nation, lan- 
guage, education, but by its very belief in 
Jesus as the Anointed of God it was inward- 
ly kept together, so that their unity and 
brotherly love surprised everybody. Later 
development must not make us forget that 
Christianity was originally and according to 
its essence not a national but a personal reli- 
gion. The inner personal attitude of the 
individual determines his relation to the con- 
gregation, to the Church of Christ. Herein 
consists an essential moment of the progress 
of spiritualization and inwardness from the 
Old to the New Covenant, from Judaism to 
Christianity. 

It is no less important to acknowledge and 
to hold fast that the new relation in which 
believing Christians stand to God as their 
Father, is not merely opened by Jesus, dis- 
covered and proclaimed, but is conditioned 
by his person. Even according to the three 
first gospels Jesus presented himself as the 
One who decided on reception into or exclu- 
sion from the kingdom of God. He per- 
sonally remitted men their sins just as he 
healed their diseases. His many healings 



72 The Peculiarity of the 

which appertained to his daily work were not 
merely proofs of mercy; for, according to 
his mode of thinking, he did not care so 
much that these children of men should 
enjoy a few more years the use of their 
sound limbs, but rather for this, that they 
should enter into the kingdom of God. For 
said he: "It is better for thee to enter into 
life maimed, than having two hands to go 
into hell/' etc. (Mark 9. 43-47). These 
healings had rather also the expressed pur- 
pose to justify him as such who had power 
to forgive sins (Mark 2. 10 sq.) and alto- 
gether to prove him as the promised Christ 
(Matt. 11. 4 sq. ; see also 11. 21 sqq.). 
Where Jesus gave his disciples powers of 
this kind, to heal diseases, to drive out im- 
pure spirits, etc., he told them to act in his 
name, as it were in his place. He also gave 
them not merely a doctrine concerning God 
and directions for a God-pleasing life which 
were also valid aside from his person, so 
that they could practice his injunctions also 
without him, but what he taught them and 
made them do, was to stand in immediate 
relation to the kingdom of God, whose King 
he is, which kingdom came in his person and 



Religion of the Bible 73 

the full development of which was to be 
expected in the future. 

But a necessary preliminary condition 
which must be fulfilled ere this glorious con- 
summation could come about was, according 
to the statements often repeated by Jesus, 
his impending suffering, death, and resurrec- 
tion in the near future. These assurances of 
Jesus have not received as yet their proper 
recognition by some of our modern theolo- 
gians. Just as formerly in the old rational- 
ism, so now on the part of some, a teaching 
is pointed out as the essential service which 
Jesus rendered to humanity, which could 
just as well have been founded on itself as 
upon his person, a teaching of the goodness 
and love of the heavenly Father, as whose 
child one may feel himself in all conditions 
of life and despite of the accusations of con- 
science, and of the brotherly love which one 
should show to all men, even to his enemies 
— a teaching, therefore, which one may see 
already fostered in the Old Testament and 
which Judaism could pluck as ripe fruit with- 
out further special revelation of God. It is 
not easy for these theologians to explain the 
great stress which Jesus put upon the neces- 



74 The Peculiarity of the 

sity of his suffering and violent death. They 
would look upon this suffering and death 
only as a kind of appendix and specimen to 
that very teaching. Here Jesus's trust in 
God proved itself under the most difficult 
circumstances conceivable, and showed his 
love to men in that he held back this proof 
of it to the last. 

I confess that this explanation of his un- 
deniably voluntary death, considered in a 
purely human, historical way, strikes me as 
improbability itself. Whoever compares the 
careers of other great founders of religion, 
of a Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, must 
above all things be surprised at the very dis- 
proportionate shortness of the ministry of 
Jesus. If he desired above everything to 
impress men with such teaching by his word 
and example, he had to preach and propa- 
gate this truth as long as possible, in order 
that it would have time to take sufficient 
root in closer and wider circles; and with 
his unlimited trust in God, he could not 
doubt at all that a long and successful activi- 
ty was assigned to him, from which one 
could expect that it would serve its purpose. 
Instead, he speaks almost from the begin- 



Religion of the Bible 75 

ning and again and again of the cross, of 
his coming suffering, and violent death; 
yea, he speaks of it in such a manner (for 
instance, Mark 10. 45; Matt, 20. 28) as if 
he considered it as the chief object of his 
coming, the climax of his mission! He 
could not have had in view a mere didactic 
martyr-death. Before definitely formulating 
his teaching in any way, and before it was 
understood in any degree — if only by his 
most select disciples — and remembering all 
the misunderstandings of his teachings unto 
the last evening — how could he run so 
prematurely to a martyr-death to confirm 
by his example the truth of his teaching! 
And if he wanted this, if he really meant to 
illustrate merely the victory of trust in God, 
or as, for instance, Ritschl explained the 
meaning of ransom, if he wished to show to 
his followers that one must not fear death 
since the pious became not objectless in 
death — he should not have died this death ; 
he ought to have died like a Socrates, with- 
out sign of pain, convincing his disciples by 
his serene face that death is nothing. He 
dared not be sore amazed and very heavy 
in Gethsemane at the mere approach of 



76 The Peculiarity of the 

death ; he dared not exclaim from the cross : 
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me !" This end, leaving aside the resurrec- 
tion as problematical or unhistorical, is a 
bad pattern for his followers. Only one in- 
ference can be drawn from it : "If they do 
these things in a green tree, what shall be 
done in the dry?" If trust in God has not 
kept the most godly of the sons of God from 
such a dreadful end, what right have we to 
expect from God anything better! 

Wholly aside from the Christian faith, it 
seems to me an impossibility from a purely 
historical and religio-comparative point of 
view to ascribe to Jesus that scheming in- 
tention, considering his evidently spontane- 
ous surrender to death. If we only had the 
three synoptists, and no Gospel of John, and 
not one Pauline Epistle, I could only infer 
from the words of Jesus and his entire 
demeanor that, according to the prophecies 
of Scripture, he seems to have considered 
his suffering and death as his principal work 
for which his teaching was preparatory; 
and the voluntary surrender of his life unto 
death he seems to have conceived as a neces- 
sary atonement for the sins of men, and by 



Religion of the Bible 77 

which he expected to redeem many from the 
curse of sin and its consequences. In other 
words, what one calls the Pauline doctrine 
of redemption is only the development of 
that which Jesus consciously endeavored to 
obtain. 

By this position which Jesus occupied over 
against his congregation, Christianity essen- 
tially differed not only from Judaism but 
also from Islamism, Buddhism, and other 
spiritual religions. Mohammed is merely a 
prophet, though "the seal of the prophets'' 
is merely a guide to lead men back to salva- 
tion by the "straight way." But Jesus claims 
to be himself "the Way." Buddha pretends 
to be the enlightened one who knew the 
truth. But Jesus called himself the "Light 
and the Truth." Herman Oldenberg, the 
acknowledged authority on primitive Bud- 
dhism, once said that we could wholly fancy 
away the person of Buddha without any 
detriment to his system. He is, then, only 
one of the Buddhas who have appeared in 
the course of the aeons to make known again 
the hidden or forgotten way to deliverance 
from the burden of existence. 

It is entirely different with the Gospel of 



LOFC. 



78 The Peculiarity of the 

Christ. By eliminating from it the person 
of Jesus Christ, it loses its firm hold and 
deeper content. The statement that we are 
children of God, of the God who is Love — 
which may be stated as the essence of Chris- 
tianity — would only too soon succumb to 
opposing experiences which rush against it 
from the outside world and from one's own 
consciousness and conscience. And even if 
it could yet scantily assert itself, it would 
lose the deeper content which it has in the 
gospel and would sink down to a vague feel- 
ing which w r e find in all grades of culture, in 
religions of the most varied kind where God 
is called on as Father of mankind, save that 
no higher power of life proceeds from this 
consciousness. 

But if we emphasize the ethical as well as 
the essential in the teaching of Jesus, a com- 
parison of Confucius and the Chinese mas- 
ters is to be recommended. The old rational- 
ism has not seldom compared Jesus and 
Confucius. It did it with a certain right be- 
cause, as a moralist, it esteemed Jesus the 
most. Now it is remarkable that, to the 
question whether there exists a single word 
which could serve as a central maxim for 



Religion of the Bible 79 

the whole life, Kong-tse answered : "Is not 
reciprocity such a word? What you wish 
not done unto you, do also not to others.'' 1 
Thus, what Jesus indicated (Matt. 7. 12) 
as the contents of the Law and the Prophets, 
Master Kong praised already 550 years 
earlier as the sum of ethics. Jesus, it is true, 
goes further by demanding: "Love your 
enemies!" This the Chinese expressly re- 
fused with the words: "By recompensing 
the wrong w T ith goodness, how then shall 
goodness be recompensed? Recompense 
wrong with right and goodness with good- 
ness/' But these are very much mistaken 
who think that Jesus was the first who 
preached love for enemies. Kong-tse refused 
it as an exaggeration for the very reason 
that his predecessor Laotse had taught it. 
And when in certain quarters Jesus had re- 
cently been represented with great partiality 
as a social, moral philosopher, he had in 
that Micius, 2 a not unworthy analogue, who 
was indeed not considered orthodox but 
wholly proceeding from the religious ideas 
of ancient China, taught : "As heaven loves 



1 Orelli, I. c, p. 69 sq. 2 Ibid., 1. c, pp. 74 sqq. 



80 The Peculiarity of the 

all men without discrimination and does 
good to all, thus let one love all." His 
maxim was: "Love that of the other like 
your own. Would all act accordingly, all 
social relations would turn out happily." 
He expects therefrom an undisturbed gov- 
ernment of the heaven over all the earth. 
At the same time it is significant that the 
objection that such a kingdom of mutual 
love cannot be brought about on account of 
the egotism of man, he answered: "If the 
good example would be given from above 
and reward and punishment would be used 
for that end, it could be accomplished. How 
have courtiers put themselves already out 
of the way to please the rulers ! And if they 
only would condescend to such an exercise 
of love, one would experience that love 
begets love and therefore yields much 
profit." This optimism with reference to 
the human will and power is characteristic 
of all these Chinese teachers. They always 
imagine that man on the whole is good, and 
if he is only set right and sees the good 
example, it cannot fail. Jesus did not share 
this optimism ; otherwise he would not have 
prepared for death. 



Religion of the Bible 8i 

We see, however, that the specific in 
Christianity does not lie even in the teach- 
ing of a humanity of the furthest extent; 
its essence lies in the person of Jesus united 
with God and in his unique intercession for 
man. By this the disciple of Jesus is also 
inseparably united to this person. For 
Christ is not only the teacher but the priestly 
mediator, who assures for him access to 
the heavenly Father. This gives to genuine 
Christianity its special peculiarity. We have 
not a hieratic apparatus, an impersonal insti- 
tution, which assures to the individual his 
salvation ; this is a degeneration of genuine 
Christianity in the churches of a Catholic 
type. It is also a degeneration when in cer- 
tain newer Protestant theology it is some- 
times taught As a member of the Christian 
Church I have part in Christ. Rather, when 
and so far as I have a share in Christ have 
I become and am a member of the true, 
believing Church of Christ. 

For this we may only refer to a charac- 
teristic life-form of the Christian Church. 
In comparative religion, ministerial acts 
peculiar to a religion are always especially 
important. Now Christianity has only two 



82 The Peculiarity of the 



such forms which specifically belong to it: 
Baptism and the Lord's Supper. It is of 
great interest to note how strongly these 
two acts testify the indispensableness of a 
living relation of the individual to the per- 
son of Jesus. Holy baptism is given in the 
name of Jesus. It is an immersion and 
submersion of the human person ; the going 
down, as it were, of one's own ego, in whose 
place, through the power of Jesus Christ, is 
to come another, a new one. "Know ye 
not," writes Paul, "that as many of us as 
were baptized into Jesus Christ, were bap- 
tized into his death? Therefore we are 
buried with him by baptism into death : that 
like as Christ was raised up from the dead, 
even so we should walk in newness of life" 
(Rom. 6. 3 sq.). This, however, is the Chris- 
tian rite of initiation which is performed on 
those who believe in Christ. Only after one 
has given up his own person and taken 
Christ, as it were, in its stead, does he be- 
come, on the whole, a member of the church. 

Baptism, the " washing of regeneration," 
means thus a radical break with the past. Is 
it not strange that Israelites, Mohammedans, 
Hindoos, who inwardly are closely connect- 



Religion of the Bible 83 

ed with Christianity, show an insuperable 
aversion to baptism and cannot bring them- 
selves to receive it ? This does not rest upon 
a mere prejudice against an outward for- 
mality, but on a correct feeling that many 
Christians have with regard to baptism. 
These feel that in it there lies the giving 
up of the natural man, which is more pain- 
ful than mere circumcision or the tooth- 
drawing of the Bora, or the cruel consecra- 
tions of the Mithra-service. It concerns 
directly the death of the old man in the name 
of Christ. 

But when a man through his incorpora- 
tion in Christ, the Risen One, has come to 
a new life from above, he can only preserve 
this life by communion with the person of 
Christ. This expresses as clearly as word 
and symbol can speak, the Lord's Supper. 
Here Jesus assigns himself as meat and 
drink. The Christian is to feed and to live 
upon him who personally is the Giver of 
the highest salvation. Jesus could not more 
strongly express the connection of each indi- 
vidual disciple to his person. Here are 
entirely confirmed the Johannine statements : 
"I am the bread of life." "Without me ye 



84 The Peculiarity of the 

can do nothing!" "Abide in me, and I in 
you," etc. 

The idea of the church, the communion 
of Christians among themselves, is indeed 
of great importance in Christianity; but 
compared to the relation of the individual to 
Christ, this communion of the Christians 
among themselves is secondary, for it is 
established by that and always remains con- 
ditioned by that. The closest communion 
of Christians comes about only through the 
Holy Spirit, who comes to every one and 
becomes his personal possession after that 
he has become a believer in Christ. Thus 
the Christian state is perfected by a com- 
munion of the human with the divine per- 
sonal Spirit, which cannot be obtained out- 
side of Christianity. We see Christianity 
as the religion in which the divine personal 
life opens the purest and richest, and per- 
vades man in the most personal manner. On 
this account it alone perfectly realizes the 
idea of religion. It is the true, the perfect 
religion. 



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